Police said Saturday they have found a missing female high school student in the apartment of a 30-year-old man in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, and arrested him in connection with a previous case of abduction.
Police suspect Hiroshi Wada threatened a 26-year-old woman with a knife in the city of Hiroshima on Wednesday evening and confined her in his car for about two hours before releasing her in another part of the city.
The 16-year-old student from Kure, who had been missing since Thursday evening, had managed to send an e-mail to her mother and a friend via her mobile phone, saying, "I am with a tall man around 30. I was taken in a small black car."
The police said the message gave a similar profile to the man who had earlier abducted the Hiroshima woman, and they discovered his address through his car number plate, which the woman remembered.
They went to Wada's apartment Friday night and found him there with the student.
The girl said she had been threatened with a knife and forcibly abducted, the police said. Neither of the women was harmed, they added.